“Sweetie?”
“It’s okay,” Charles shouted back. “It’s just a scarecrow.”
Was it? Was that what it was? A simple scare-device to send birds winging off into the sky? He leaned on the hedge and pulled himself up so that he might see the ground behind. It was as he had already surmised, simple grazing land. There was no sign of any animals … and none when they had first arrived.
“And no scarecrows,” he said softly. “There were no scarecrows.”
“Come back to the house,” Trudy called.
Charles turned to walk back, and that was when he noticed it. Over by the other hedge that ran at ninety degrees to the one that bordered the roadside was a long block of some kind—a feeding trough, Charles assumed, though there were no animals visible. What was visible, however, was another scarecrow, almost identical to the one immediately in front of him. He did a double and then a triple take, flicking his eyes from one to the other. Yes, the two of them were exactly the same.
“There’s another one,” Charles said, immediately regretting the unease that he had allowed to infiltrate the statement.
“What? What did you say?” Trudy shouted.
“Dad … will you—”
“I said, there’s another one. Another damned scarecrow.”
A wind flurried and the scarecrow turned creakily on its stake. When Charles looked over, he saw the scarecrow by the trough list to the right, as though hunkering down in preparation for something.
Charles turned, sweeping his eyes over the field behind the hedge, and at first it looked okay. But then, on a second glance, as he clapped his hands together after grappling with the hedgerow, Charles could make out a solitary figure standing just below the drop where the field ran down toward Kindling Beck.
Another scarecrow.
Three scarecrows—at least, he thought; there could well be more—and all of them standing in a field that didn’t appear to be growing anything at all.
“Dad?”
Should that bother him? Scarecrows?
“Charlie, come back to the house.”
“I’m going back to the house,” Charles whispered to the scarecrow immediately in front of him. For a few seconds he half-expected it to lean forward conspiratorially and, with a gloved hand of wood and old clothes, whisper in a soil-smelling hoarse voice: Think I’ll join you all … We’ll have ourselves a little party.
But it didn’t.
Charles took a deep breath and turned on his heel. Anyone watching might have concluded that he was some kind of dancer, this man who faced up to scarecrows by a nighttime hedge, pirouetting in the cold.
Something rustled behind him and he hunched his shoulders, waiting for the inevitable contact. But nothing came.
“The scarecrow fell over!” Tom shouted. There was a tone of wonder in his voice, that could easily have worked just as well if he had simply called out, It’s alive!
Charles turned around and, sure enough, the scarecrow behind the hedge had gone. It had fallen over, of course … the wooden stake had given in to the pressures of gravity and taken a tumble. It was nothing more sinister than that. ’Tis the wind and nothing more! a voice in Charles’s mind hissed. Quoth the raven …
“Come on,” he announced, clapping of hands. “Supper, and then story-time.”
V: Up the Stairs to Bedfordshire
It was a little before nine o’clock when the food finally arrived, delivered in a large brown bag by a youth of maybe nineteen or twenty who boasted a thick thatch of coal-black hair and smiled all the time while he chewed on what appeared to be a piece of root.
“Very good,” the boy had said repeatedly in a singsong fashion as Charles counted bills into his proffered hand. And when, following careful thought, Charles had added three extra pound coins, the young man clasped his hands tightly together as if in prayer and bowed. “Very good,” he had told Charles once more, still smiling. “I am very grateful to you.”
“You’re very welcome.” Charles had to fight not to mimic the man’s tuneful speech, but as he closed the door, he let loose a smile.
Tom stood by the little window at the foot of the stairs and watched the deliveryman straddle his aged Honda and kick-start it. The machine leapt and for a minute Tom thought he was going fall backward while the Honda reared into the air and shot forward toward the old barn by the side of the house. But he got it under control. He gave a wave to the house and shouted something that sounded like “Very good!”—though Tom couldn’t be sure—then set off along the side of the building.
Charles pushed the dead bolt across the door. “Where’s he going?” he asked.
“Back to work? Wh—Tom! No!” Trudy slapped her son’s hand as he tried to fish a piece of chicken from Trudy’s masala.
“His fingers are in that now, Mom,” Gerry said.
Tom mimicked his sister’s whine, jiggling his head from side to side: “‘Oh, his fingers are in that now, Mumsy-wumsy … his—’”
Charles shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.” And he joined in the chaos of what always served as mealtime for the Cavanaghs as everyone took their places at the large table, shifting boxes across the kitchen floor.
“I’ll put some music on,” Gerry suggested, but her mother laid a hand on her arm and smiled tiredly.
“Not right now,” Trudy said.
On any one of a thousand other occasions, Gerry would have thrown a tantrum, complaining that her mother hated her music and then storming up to her room, only to allow herself to be coaxed back to the family hearthside a little later, when the point had been made. But not this night.
“Radio?” Tom suggested around a folded wedge of garlic and coriander naan bread.
“Mmm.” Trudy nodded gratefully. “Radio 3? Classic FM?”
He took another bite of naan, dipped it into his chicken korma and walked across to the counter. Soon soft music swirled through the air and everyone began to feel more normal again.
The food had been devoured, and the whole house smelled of an intoxicating blend of warmth and exotic spices.
Tom’s Captain America clock registered 21:22 when he finally pulled the bedclothes up around his chin.
“Do we have to have a fairy story?” Gerry wanted to know. When Charles turned to her he was momentarily sideswiped by the fact that his little girl was fast becoming a woman. No, forget that, he thought, Geraldine Cavanagh is a woman—a fourteen-year-old one, admittedly, but a woman nonetheless. Jesus, how did that happen?
“Don’t you like fairy stories?” Tom asked.
“Hey,” Charles said, rubbing his daughter’s shoulder, “don’t get too old for fairy stories—not yet, anyways.”
Gerry sighed and hunkered down on the spare bed.
“You want me to come read to you in your own room?”
She thought for a few seconds and then shook her head. “No,” she said, “’s okay. I’ll stay.”
“Okay,” Charles said, “then I’ll begin.”
And he did.
“‘A certain mother’s child,’” Charles recited, “‘had been taken away out of its cradle by elves, and a changeling with a large head and staring eyes, which would do nothing but eat and drink, lay in its place.
“‘In her trouble, the mother went to her neighbor, and asked her advice. The neighbor said—’”
And there followed the Grimms’ tale about boiling water and eggshells, and the imp protesting that, despite being as old as the Wester Forest, he had never seen such a thing. Whereupon he began to laugh, and in so doing he brought his situation to the attention of the elves, who returned the stolen child and took the changeling away with them.
“‘And so the mother and her child were reunited,’” Charles said in conclusion.
“How did the elves hear? The laughter, I mean.”
“Elves can hear anything from any distance at all,” Charles said. He felt that pretty well tied everything up neatly.
Gerry did not agree. “That doesn’t
make any sense.” She thought for a few seconds and then added, “Nor does it make any sense that I should be listening to fairy stories at my age.”
Charles thought about that for a moment and decided not to respond. He considered bringing Tom into the discussion, but only a tufty top of his hair was visible on the pillow and the slight sawing sound that his son was producing made him decide against it.
“Come on,” Charles whispered, “let’s leave him to it.” The day was taking its toll on him, too, and he simply couldn’t control a yawn so big he half-expected his head to split in half and the top half flip over, like one of the Muppets.
Charles gave his daughter a big hug. “You okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.” She shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
Somewhere in the bowels of the house a pipe clunked and a floorboard creaked.
“What was that?” Although she was putting on a brave face, Gerry had been spooked by her father’s tale. She glanced at the window and was pleased to see the sky was clear and the moon shining.
“Hey, you scared?”
She shook her head emphatically. “Nuh uh.”
Once she had climbed into bed, Charles said, “It’s okay to be scared sometimes, you know.”
“I’m. Not. Scared.”
“Okay.” He held up his hands for a few seconds and then let them drop to his side. “I guess it’s okay not to be scared too.” He looked down at her and smiled.
Gerry’s face softened and she pulled the top sheet over the bottom of her face so that he couldn’t see her mouth.
She was smiling as well.
VI: Neither the Sand nor the Sea
Tom had been in that lazy free fall that existed between wakefulness and sleep, those magical seconds when the mind is aware of what’s happening, but is either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
“Neither the sand nor the sea,” Tom’s paternal grandfather used to say. The expression fascinated Tom, but for some reason, it scared his sister. On this night he was very aware of the two areas: the wet ocean spreading around his feet, advancing and then retreating, always playfully, and conversely, the feel of the sand, not soft but not hard either, forcing itself between the toes of his right foot while the left relished the cool wetness.
But then, just as he started to feel a slight lean toward the endless waves, something outside in the hallway made a sound.
Tom’s eyes opened wide and, without moving his head, he stared at the doorway. The bedroom door was slightly ajar. Was someone out there? He strained to hear. His mother and father were still downstairs; he could hear them muttering to each other and he could hear the strains of music from the radio.
He sat upright in his bed, pulling the sheet tightly around him, and tried to listen some more. This time he attempted to separate the noises.
There was the music—strings, French horns, oboes, cymbals—he recognized these sounds and felt comfortable with them, safe. In his head, Tom moved those to one side. Keeping his eyes trained on the slightly open door, he listened to the two voices, his mother and father … split them up in his mind: his dad’s West Yorkshire twang, all flattened vowels and lazy t’s and his mother’s singsong Midlands brogue. He yawned—and almost missed the noise out on the landing.
His eyes were more acclimatized to the darkness now, but even so, he couldn’t make out anything that could have made the sound. The more he concentrated on the doorway, the more he wondered if maybe he had made a mistake. Maybe the noise had come from outside and not from the landing at all.
Moving very slowly, Tom swiveled around so that he could reach the windowsill and lean on it so that he could see outside.
What a lot to see in the nighttime country …
The door behind him creaked open.
“Ger?” Tom whispered. Perhaps she was playing around, the way she’d done yesterday, messing with the door handle.
But you don’t believe that, do you? Tom’s inner voice reasoned. You’re not stupid. You might want to believe it, but you know it wasn’t your sister’s hand on that handle.
Something shivered down his spine. Without turning around, Tom knew that his inner voice was right: he was no longer alone in his bedroom.
He suddenly grew very cold and he wanted to curl up in bed again, but he was too busy watching a line of scarecrows walking across the horizon—he counted eight of them, each one strapped to its own stake, which it dragged along behind it. Clouds scudded from right to left, obscuring the moon one minute and then allowing the countryside to be bathed in silver light for a few seconds. Above the scarecrows, birds wheeled and whirled. Birds? You know they’re not birds, the voice whispered in Tom’s inner ear. Those are bats.
Bats! Tom had never seen a bat, not up close anyway. He had seen them on TV, natural history programs, but that was it.
Whatever it was that had come into Tom’s bedroom now knocked over something just inside the doorway. Tom desperately wanted to turn around, particularly when he heard more things crash over. Something rolled along the bare floorboards under the bed.
“Gerry?” Tom said. He could just shout right out and Gerry and Mom and Dad would come blustering in here, asking what the hell was the matter, and he would be there, half-standing on his bed like a baby, eyes wide-open and having no answer for them. Because there wouldn’t be anything there.
But what about the scarecrows? the voice in his head asked.
Yes, that was a very good point. What about the scarecrows?
Something was touching his bed now. He could feel the slightest of movements on the bedclothes. He started to moan very softly, and at the first sound he made, there was a noticeable cessation of anything moving on the bed.
Way over on the horizon, where the land dropped away into Kindling Woods, the scarecrows were now turning around to face the house fully, the bats still wheeling above their heads. But were they actual heads? No, of course not. He could see that from here, a hundred or more yards distant—
(The mattress sank on one side: now something was trying to get onto it.)
—that they were not heads at all … they were simply pieces of fabric and old clothing, off-cuts from long-abandoned dresses and shirts, old blankets and the like, pegs for noses, small flaps of make-up sponges, the sort his mother used to apply her foundation, cut clean in half like half-moons for the mouths. And those were not eyes—
(Had something just brushed Tom’s bare left ankle?)
—those were sewn-on buttons … and he must not allow the tiny glints of moonshine reflected from the scarecrows’ button eyes to check his resolve—
(A resolve? You’ve got a resolve, Lame-brain? he imagined his sister saying to him. You don’t even know what a resolve is.)
—his resolve not to allow this thing, whatever it was—
(This thing now fully on his bed; he can feel the pressure of it, can feel it tilting the mattress.)
“Gerry, if that’s you …” he whispered to the room, even though he knew that it was not.
The touch on his ankle was gentle, almost loving. At first he allowed his foot to respond. The touch wasn’t unpleasant, not forceful nor aggressive, but then it felt a little slimy. From nowhere (but it must have come from somewhere … even though his window was almost twenty feet up in the air), a scarecrow’s head appeared and flopped fully against the pane. The head turned slightly, so that it was almost in profile. A battered trilby hat sat askew on the scarecrow’s head and its arms stretched out to either side. The stitching of the thing’s mouth was a little uneven, so that it looked like it was sneering at him, and the eye-buttons were not straight, which made it look as though it was about to chastise him for some wrongdoing.
It’s a hand, he thought as the scarecrow’s head slowly fell from view, the hat dislodging, pushed up and back by the brim until it fell off completely, exposing a material dome beneath, sprinkled with dry straw.
It’s a hand grasping at my foot, he thought.
&n
bsp; Then:
Tom, it’s me.
Gerry? But he didn’t actually speak his sister’s name. Her voice sounded different. But now the touch of her hand on his foot (it was her hand, wasn’t it?)—even that, the touch of his sister’s hand—felt … loving and warm. And his sister was not—and never had been—loving and warm …
He started to turn his head, slowly, while the hand—
(Please God, please let it be a hand—those fingernails feel ever so sharp.)
—continued to massage his ankle.
He tried to ignore the scarecrow’s face at the bottom of the windowpane, clothes-peg nose pressed against the glass … and that was cool—the black button eyes blinked at him, almost like a friendly, You okay, pal? and in so doing they revealed a blackness far greater behind the rough stitching.
At last he could stand it no more. He turned his head so that now he was looking at the wall beside the window. As his eyes acclimatized, he saw shadows moving amidst shadows, a darkness on top of the muted darkness of things caught in relief. He tilted his head slightly more, now almost oblivious to the massaging of his ankle.
Then at last he turned fully around.
VII: Who’s Gerald?
“They tucked up?”
Charles nodded and slumped onto the sofa. “I can’t face much more tonight.” He saw the pot of herbal tea and immediately fancied one for himself.
“That’s okay, Charlie-mine. Where’re you going?”
He pointed at Trudy’s pot. “I’ll get a cup.” He poured, then slurped. A little tepid, but good.
“What about the scarecrows?” Trudy asked.
“What about them?”
“That land is not arable. You know that, right?”
“Have we got any chocolate? I need a fix.”
She pointed at the pile of boxes still to be unpacked. “Top box.” She sighed and stretched. “I’m going to be unpacking all day tomorrow—oh, I just remembered: I’m getting a visitor.”
Speaking around a thick wedge of Snickers bar he asked, “Who’s that?”
Fearie Tales Page 35
